Published in RED INK: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities (Spring 2017).

The Language of Flowers

a songbird swallows a bud that blooms in its gut
snaking up the esophagus
like my mother swore couldn’t happen

hollowing its stem and
laying petals across the soft pink throat
along the rigid inside of the narrow beak

where out spill pollen and stamen—
each call a blush of dust
every song a fluttering of leaves

Published (sans title) by Nanoism (March 2015).

My Deepest Regrets

I regret little: cutting my sister’s arm on accident; breaking Granny’s stained-glass; running over my neighbor’s cat; denying it all later.

“Mask4Mask” photo series from the Offroad Productions show A Day With(out) Art: Santa Fe. All taken on iPhone using Hipstamatic app.

“Dissolve” limited edition photo series from the Strangers Collective show Long Echo. All unedited iPhone photos. 

“Blue Sky Gold” photo series and handmade zines from the Strangers Collective show Narrows. Photography taken on iPhone, most using Hipstamatic app.

 

“Self-Portraits of the Southwest” photo series from the Strangers Collective show Trouble Vision. All taken on iPhone using Hipstamatic app.

Published in the Amore: Love Poems anthology (Spring 2016).

Under mango green

sheets, down comforter
the tropical colors of
papayas’ and cantaloupes’

inner fruit, your walls pomegranate,
avocado furniture, ceiling a bright plum.
We would slurp mango slices
on piled pillows, legs tangled together,

juices dripping from our wrists,
your soft chin, lips skating
across the heel of a hand,
trailing sticky liquid behind.

I never got to tell you how
those tastes influenced me:
my love of fleshy unknown fruits,
of lush brazen women, the way

I still think of you when I savor
sweet juice creeping down my chin.

Published in the Santa Fe Literary Review (2017).

The Contents of My Purse

Gum to chew when you’re talking over me; keys; cell phone and charger, obviously; glitter pens to absentmindedly swirl your name, those fat Sharpies to blot it out; tampons for surprises—including, to be clear, nosebleeds and spills; that book you told me to read forever ago, with no bookmark and not even one page dog-eared; a smooth stone you found way back when we used to walk by the river every week; business cards—mostly other people’s, but a few of the ones for my paintings with my old phone number crossed out; my name tag from work, a smear of long-dried-but-still-sticky gravy over the last three letters; wallet, stuffed thick with receipts and pictures and credit cards I can no longer use; a small notebook for random reminders, phone numbers, grocery lists and angry notes to shove under your door; quarters for downtown parking on the off-chance you offer to pay for dinner—even just coffee—if we meet up; a plastic airplane bottle of chardonnay; mace for might-be-muggers; that ring you gave me, the prongs around the little glass gem crowned with lint; a coupon for two-for-one steak dinners, probably already expired; the first—only?—letter you ever wrote me—the envelope folded in half and in half again, then tucked into a side-pocket and accidentally through a tear in the lining—the scent of your cologne still lingering rich and spicy on the crisp paper, perfuming my bag from silky depths I can never quite seem to find.

 Published in HeartWood Literary Magazine Issue 3 (April 2017).

The Girl Grown from Coral (Notes)

1. Whenever this One Guy comes through Alexis’s checkout line in the Phoenix, Arizona Whole Foods, she can’t help but imagine his tongue (flat and profound) positioned just below her belly button, skating along her clavicle, or their bodies emanating heat like stretches of road in the desert outside, hazing over imperfections and giving them each a flushed glow. Each time, just after she blushes when she first spies him, she can feel light-headed lust like slow smoke under her skin, seeping out the way she has seen coral (when scuba diving with her estranged father on vacations paid for by his guilt) release great silky clouds of eggs and sperm, surrounding her in ribbons of mist made of her attraction to this One Guy.
Coral is a simple animal, much like her desire for him: inspired by his narrow but muscular shoulders, the shapes in his curly auburn hair, face dappled with light freckles, lines of musculature drawn across his calves, the in-between-green-and-blue color of his eyes. She has paid such careful attention when he stands before her, absently tapping buttons after swiping his credit card or scooping his purchases into his eco-friendly grocery bag, that she knows what he’ll buy to some degree based on the time of day he comes in: always apples (braeburns or pink ladies or Fujis), in the mornings a protein bar, most times at least one of those nasty Kombucha drinks, in the afternoon a large bag of chips, either hummus or salsa, and maybe a vegetarian frozen pizza, which always makes Alexis wonder—as she watches him leave, her head clearing like warm salty waters as the tide moves in—if all that is for him.

2. A New Mexican tourist has just smiled as she told Alexis about the bright red and soft pink coral in her silver rings and thick bracelets—”Coral are like us: what’s left of the dead stacked into foundations for the living. One of the sacred gifts my pueblo received.”—and Alexis is twisting the ring of turquoise and coral that she got in her Gram’s will, thinking of the mesas outside Gram’s house and the Rio Grande flowing about a mile off, but then forgets the whole vast landscape when the One Guy is suddenly in front of her in a tank top—his arms looking especially solid and soft at the same time—looking right in her eyes and saying, “I like when you’re working, Alexis. I try to always come through your line.”
A dizziness (like rising too quickly with a scuba tank or when she bums cigarettes while drinking) overtakes Alexis and her lungs feel a bit smaller than before as she pushes his items across the scanner and says, “Thanks. Nice seeing you. Too.”
He chuckles, lifts the pasta and tomatoes into his bag as she tries to conjure anything else to say, anything to prove that he just surprised her, that’s all.
He slips his sunglasses over his eyes. “Well, have a good one.” Then he is gone and Alexis is still just trying to breathe (spinning her ring twice as quick as before), feeling like when a sudden tropical storm takes out years of diligent growth in a single unexpected wave.

3. All that evening until she closes out her register, she replays their latest interaction in her head, her legs still a little trembly as she sculpts what will surely be perfect replies for next time. She pictures the One Guy laughing like she knows he’s not in a while, eyes wide as he’s taken comfortably aback by Alexis’s sudden confidence, her sense of humor, the way she plays right into his hand. His reaction (she knows) will be perfect, but she has to give herself the right self-image to pull it off, has to convince herself that she can put a hand on her hip and a smirk on her lips just right so that her One Guy never even realizes it wasn’t natural—because if she doesn’t believe it, how will he?

4. That night in her bed (nude because this fucking heat!) she watches headlights draw stripes along the ceiling and thinks of his lean body and almost-well-kept beard, the few light hairs peeking from his shirt collar, the ways she will impress him the next time he appears before her, bright as the desert sun. When her hands slide where his would go, she can suddenly see him more clearly than before, reaching out for her—his hair floating like he’s underwater, crowned by small shells and pale crab claws long abandoned, and he’s whispering to her like a bubbling spring—then pulling her by the hand: out the door and across the scrubby plains and rough mountains to the closest body of water, where it looks like back home, mesas like outside her old front door, a river beside.
Then Alexis sees herself, fertile as a reef: a school of little silver fish appear from behind her back as brittle stars and sea fans reach from her hair, soft anemones sprout from her hips, an eel snakes out of the cave of her loosely-held fist and bright coral branches from her elbow, thighs, the wrist of the hand still held in his.

5. But a few days later—after noticing that One Guy in the dry goods aisle with a girl she has not seen before who is definitely not his sister—Alexis decides that she likes the fact that coral is of all things immobile, could not pursue even if it wanted to, and seems to simply ignore mating but for the time and place when the seething clouds appear and collide, their substance coming together (a sweaty, cursing fuck in the backseat of his car or the community room on her break a few weeks later that neither of them could have planned for) only to then disappear with the tides like they had never even spoken, the singular proof of their union an anchoring polyp, swelling shoals, the layering bones of blossoms once met.

 

Published in HeartWood Literary Magazine Issue 3 (April 2017).

Jane Doe

1. The shallow hole is dug surprisingly close to the house despite the nearby woods, unlike most places bodies are found, which are marked by several things: soft soil, lots of trees for coverage, abandoned buildings, wildlife to eat remains, and no people for as far as possible. 2. As far as possible, it seems, even the remotest areas have been utilized for violence—one park ranger found a thumb nailed to a tree, another a nude corpse 70 miles from any road—meaning that really, though maybe not plausibly, bodies can be found just about anywhere. 3. Found just about anywhere well-populated, a dead body causes an anxious stir and everyone panics, but out in the country—where rural boogeymen still sing from the trees at night—no one talks about a body too much unless it was a friend or relative. 4. A friend or relative is almost always behind it—like poisoned candy and deep-set psychological issues—but most of them never get picked up because once the victim is dead, who’s to say what happened? 5. What happened here, though, is still being debated: the hole was only half-filled with soil, fingertips still visible, but also seems full to overflowing with something else: delirious ennui, predatory desperation, maybe a former lover’s good luck and hope? 6. Good luck and hope never seem to be reliable enough to use as tools to get away with murder, especially now that forensic testing—white lab coats and petri dishes, trace samples and DNA swabs—is the first thing anyone does. 7. The first thing anyone does when they find a body is try to find ways to believe the body isn’t really dead—even if it’s cold and buried, even if they don’t know the victim, have no ties whatsoever to whatever-the-fuck happened. 8. “Whatever the fuck happened depends on your perspective,” the lieutenant keeps saying, but everyone agrees this half-filled hole feels like a crime interrupted, like a gun left by the bed for self-defense used to take out the owners of the house or a sentence so lyrical and winding that halfway through, it simply unravels. 9. Halfway through it simply unravels, most detectives say, the best thread they had, the only one that clearly pointed to a believable killer, that explained what was happening on the night in question or before the gun was pulled out. 10. Before the gun was pulled out, the hole really did seem shallow, barely ankle-depth, but the moon through the clouds glinting off the long barrels made the hole grow so dark, the ground beneath it opening up, deep with shadow. 11. With shadow from cloud-cover blanketing the road, cut through only by headlights on the way to his place outside the suburbs, she had watched the city lights recede in the side mirror and told herself the night had been fun: a quiet date with an old flame from high school, the one who had hopefully grown out of being a little too rough during sex, who was still so handsome and acted so sweet in public. 12. Sweet in public but impatient and unapologetic afterward, some killers sexually assault their victims before yanking them outside, standing them at the edge of a hollow patch of earth stretched open like a ravenous waiting mouth, flashlight aimed at the victim’s eyes to disorient. 13. To disorient the police, some killers take the victim’s ID and plant false clues, little indicators that lead nowhere to make sure they have time to leave town, to sever ties—one last fuck, a final meal with a buddy—to pack their shit and hotwire a new car so they’re as far away as they can manage to be when the body gets discovered, when all their accomplishments and mistakes are suddenly naked before the police. 14. Naked before the police—her arm still over her eyes like when she blocked the flashlight’s glare, fell backward as screaming flames burrowed into her chest, her bare back and limbs smacking the dirt heavily—she tries to point the officers’ stoic glances in the direction he drove off, to spit his name like she used to when he dumped her in high school, to cover her gaping breasts and the little bit of blood from his bedroom, to tell them her worried mother’s phone number, to promise that she’s nothing like the girl they must think: another case gone cold in a shallow hole.